Pan-seared tilapia with bacon and shallots (links to a previous post)

A: We’re all scared of fish. Undercooked, fish of any but the best quality ends up cold, clammy and unappetizing. Overcooked, it falls apart or ends up chewy. Overcooked fish also tends to extrude its fishiest chemicals, which is one of the reasons reheating fish can be so difficult. But a pan-fried fish can be a wonderful thing. Simple, delicate, delicious. To successfully pan-fry fish, it’s important to consider the following: method, variety, fat, heat, hardware.

Method
I’m going to make the assumption that when you ask about pan-frying a fish, you’re talking about frying fish in a skillet with a little bit of oil, like you might sear tuna. The considerations I talk about here will work for any kind of frying, but fish usually doesn’t stick if you go with a traditional pan-fry method: a quarter to half an inch of oil in a heavy skillet, battered fish fried on one side, then the other. Fish you might find at the local southern diner comes to mind. If you ARE talking about a traditional pan fry, I’ve included some batter recipes at the bottom and some simple techniques you can use to pan fry or deep fry your fish to perfection.

Variety
Fish come in all shapes and sizes. It’s a no-brainer, I know, but it has a lot do with how well it will stand up to searing in a skillet.

In general, fish have much less connective tissue than other animals, and many fish have much less connective tissue than others. Connective tissue helps hold muscle fibers together and it melts away under high heat. Your fish probably flakes apart in the pan because you’ve cooked it too long, or it didn’t have much connective tissue to begin with.

The amount of connective tissue a fish has depends largely on the life it leads beneath the waves. Fish that move a lot, like tuna and salmon, have a great deal of connective tissue because their muscles are highly developed and are in constant or near-constant use. Fish that don’t have to move very often have less connective tissue, and fish that rarely move at all have almost none, relatively speaking. So, take a moment and think about the grouper spending its days moving gently to and fro among the coral reefs in shallow waters. It’s going to have less connective tissue than the tuna or mahi-mahi, but will probably have more than, say, bass, who spend ninety-percent of their time floating still beneath downed logs or rock ledges.

Fish with a high amount of connective tissue are going to stand up well to pan searing. Fish with little connective tissue are better suited to grilling (using a fish basket), poaching, steaming or baking.

Fat
No one likes to talk about fat. It’s become an ugly word, but if you’re pan searing, whether it be fish or steak or vegetables, you’re going to need some fat. White fish like cod work marvelously with butter, but butter has a very low smoke point. Olive oil, too, has a fairly low smoke point, but the flavor it can impart to certain fish is fantastic. What I would recommend is mixing an equal part canola or other high-heat, low-flavor oil with the butter or olive oil to help raise the overall smoke point. Raising the smoke point will allow you to work at higher temperatures which might be a key to your sticky problem.

Heat
The challenge with cooking any protein is managing heat. Specifically, getting the middle heated through without burning the exterior. They key? Let the meat or fish spend a little time outside the fridge, right there on the counter. I always try to allow any protein I’m cooking to come as close to room temperature as I feel comfortable. I’ll let steaks rest, salted, for about 15 minutes on the counter. I wait the same time with chicken. Fish, depending on the thickness, might not need as much time, but certainly five or ten minutes will help immensely.

When searing fish, you’re going to work hot and fast. I would suggest searing at about medium-high (it will vary some, depending on your oven), and for no more than a couple minutes on each side, depending on how thick the fish is and the variety you have. I’d say no more than a minute per side on thin fillets of delicate fish.

Hardware
Turning fish is next to impossible without a fish spatula, especially if the fish is delicate, like the grouper I mentioned above. If you cook fish a lot, I’d recommend buying one. They’re long and thin and designed to be able to support the whole fillet. If you’re like me, and don’t cook a lot of fish, then just keep two spatulas on hand and use them in tandem when you want to turn the fillet.

I’d also invest in a good, even-heating pan. You can get incredible deals on cookware at Amazon.com.

So now you’re ready to cook

Ingredients

• Two thick grouper fillets
• Kosher salt
• fresh black pepper
• Sliced lemon
• One clove of garlic

1. Put about 1/2 a tablespoon butter and 1/2 a tablespoon canola oil in a medium-sized skillet (it’ll need to be big enough to hold both fillets). Set the skillet over medium-high heat.
2. While the oil heats, mince the garlic and sprinkle the fillets with salt.
3. Add the garlic to the oil and let it sizzle a few seconds, then place the fillets into the oil, skin side up.
   • (Note: by placing the fillets in the skillet flesh-side down, you’re allowing some of the naturally occuring fat in the fish to mingle with the oil in the pan, bringing some extra flavor to it. You’re also going to cook the most fragile side of the fish while its connective tissue is strongest)
4. After a couple minutes, use your fish spatula to flip the fillets, and cook them the same amount of time on the other side
5. Plate, sprinkle with pepper and hit them with a dash of lemon juice

The traditional fry
There are two variations on the traditional fried fish I’m familiar with: catfish, because I’m from the south, and shrimp, because shrimp tastes good.

Fried catfish:
Two catfish fillets

batter:
12 oz beer
1.5 cups flour + 1 cup flour
.5 tsp salt

Put one cup flour in a shallow dish. In a large bowl, mix together the remaining flour, the salt, and the beer. Heat about 1/2 inch oil in a heavy skillet. Pull out the catfish fillets, pat them dry, then dredge them through the flour. Dunk them briefly in the batter, and lay them into the hot oil. Cook about 90 seconds per side, serve with lemon and tartar sauce, corn bread with honey and cole slaw.

Fried shrimp
About a dozen large shrimp, peeled and deveined

breading and batter
.5 cup buttermilk
1.5 cups panko breadcrumbs
.5 tsp paprika
.5 tbl garlic powder (or less, to taste)
.5 tsp ground ginger
.5 tsp salt
black pepper to taste

Heat .5 inches of oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Pat the shrimp dry and dunk them in the buttermilk before dredging them through the dry ingredient mix. Toss them in the oil, and let them fry for no more than 90 seconds on each side. Drain on paper towels a couple moments, then enjoy.

Do you have a question about food or cooking? Drop me a line and I’ll do my best to answer it in a future edition of Burning Questions.

"Spice Cabinet: Tins with Spices" by Chris Martino

A: There are really three ways I can answer this question. The first would take up a book: The Complete Book of Spices: A Practical Guide to Spices and Aromatic Seeds, which someone else wrote. The second is grossly simple: practice (also, kind of a jerky answer). The third lays somewhere in the middle, and starts not with spices but with our tongues.

We humans have receptors for five tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory (first coined as umami by a Japanese chemist, Kikuane Ikeda, according to Harold McGee. Also according to McGee, the term roughly translates as “delicious”). In thinking about food it’s valuable to consider these fundamental tastes and then begin thinking about what kinds of ingredients awaken those taste receptors.

So really, we’re going way past spices here and instead are thinking about how to build flavors. And to do so, we’re going to make a simple tomato sauce.

Start off with one 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes. If tomatoes were in season, I’d recommend fresh ones, but they’re not right now, and the best possible tomatoes at this time of year come in cans. So go ahead and set that can on your counter.

Seasoning
The most important flavor enhancer is salt. I like to use kosher salt because its structure enables it to melt really easily into juicy foods like beef, pork, poultry, tomatoes, apple slices, hashbrowns, even oatmeal. Salt does more than just taste salty. It seasons food and enhances many of food’s natural flavors. Potatoes can taste more potato-y. Even things like bread benefit from a dash of salt. I add at least a pinch to everything I cook. (for a bit more on salt, you can check my salt post, or the essay in Michael Ruhlman’s Elements of Cooking).

So go ahead and set the salt on your counter.

Sweetness
After salt, you can begin building out the rest of the flavors with various ingredients. Sweet is fairly easy: sugar, honey, corn syrup, maple syrup, molasses. All these things can bring a certain sweetness to foods and can be added in various amounts. It’s important to think about each items’ characteristics, however. Corn syrup and sugar will provide sweetness without many other flavors. Molasses, on the other hand, brings a certain depth and smokiness to foods, and honey provides a subtle brightness, especially if you use a honey that carries with it specific characteristics of its source flowers. Orange blossom honey, for example, tends to be slightly more acidic than regular blended honey.

I’m not a big fan of sugar in my tomato sauces, but many people are, especially if they’re fond of Ragu or Prego, which all have some kind of sweetener added. If you really want some sweetness, bring out the sugar, but I’m going to say no at this point.

Sour and Bitter
I tend to think of sour and bitter are related. Each brings a certain brightness to food, though most folks believe sour is more pleasant than bitter. Indeed, “Scientists believe this was once an evolutionary advantage that warned us away from eating plants containing bitter, poisonous alkaloids.”  Each is important, however, to bring a balance of flavors to whatever you cook. In our test-case tomato sauce, the tomatoes themselves are pretty acidic and will bring brightness to the dish on their own.

But let’s say you want to make a salad dressing. You’ll want to start with a good oil and add an additional ingredient for brightness and additional flavors. For example, you could start with three tablespoons of really fine extra virgin olive oil, and a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar, a little salt, a sprinkling of minced shallots, and you have an incredible, well-balanced salad dressing. The vinegar’s acidity helps cut the liven the fatty flavors of the oil and also helps with mouth feel. Lemon juice is another great acid that can be added to dishes to give them a certain brightness or to elevate other earthier flavors. There are a couple of spices I can think of that lend this brightness: cumin and tumeric. Cumin is used in a lost of Latin American cooking and Tumeric is pretty common in a lot of Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern dishes.

In our tomato sauce, we’ll want something to help cut the acidity of the tomatoes and deepen the sauce’s overall flavor. But to do that, we have to get through the rest of the taste spectrum.

Savory (and fat)
Savory tastes are easy to come by if you’re willing to load up on the MSG. You can read about the chemistry behind the taste over on Wikipedia, but the important thing to remember is that savory qualities in food probably have as much to do with mouth feel as they do with taste. And for a good, savory mouth feel, we’re going to need a little bit of fat.

Haul out the extra virgin olive oil. This is going to do a couple things, all having to do with depth of flavor. First, the slight nutty flavor of the oil itself will lend a certain savoriness to the sauce. It will also pick up other flavor molecules from the garlic we’re going to sautee in it (might as well bring out the fresh garlic bulb and set it on the counter), and then will disperse those flavors through the sauce as the oil coats each piece of tomato, forming a sort of emulsion (fat suspended in liquid via some mechanism [an emulsifier]. In this instance, giant pieces of tomato, but in other instances, it might be mustard in a vinaigrette or egg whites in a mayonnaise.)

So, our ingredient list so far:

• 28 oz can of tomatoes
• Kosher salt
• Sugar (if you want to add sweetness)
• Olive oil
• Garlic bulb

Go ahead and get a large skillet or sauce pan and a wooden spoon.

Depth of Flavor
In the section on bitter and sour I talked some about brightness of flavor. I tend to think of taste and flavor as separate. Our taste receptors are fairly limited, but our FLAVOR receptors are complex and finely tuned. Flavor occurs when fundamental tastes blend with specific scents and aromas to produce an overall flavor experience. Part of that experience for me is the depth of flavor found in any dish. Ceviche, for example, often has a very shallow, bright flavor, with many of the flavor elements harmonizing in the upper register of sour and sweet. If you take a look at the basic ingredients list for a ceviche, and think about the individual tastes of each element, the taste profile becomes pretty clear:

• Shrimp or fish (a little sweetness, a little savoriness)
• Lemon or lime juice (sour)
• Cilantro (a little bitter, a little herb or green flavor. Both bright)
• Yellow peppers (a little heat)
• Red onion (a little brightness, a little heat)
• A little garlic (a hint of savory)
• Salt and pepper (seasoning)

We can perform the same kind of analysis on our sauce ingredients and get a good idea of where we stand in terms of flavor balance:

• Tomatoes (their inherent acidity will provide some brightness)
• Olive oil (a little savoriness, a little fat)
• Garlic (a hint of savory, plus a little flavor depth)
• kosher salt (seasoning)

As it stands, we’re going to have a very bright fairly acidic sauce. We’ll have to get some herbs and spices to help counteract that. Go ahead and get some oregano, some black pepper, some paprika and some nutmeg, and set them all aside.

Get cooking
Begin with a good stainless steel or anodized aluminum skillet. Measure in a couple splashes of olive oil (approximately 2 tablespoons, but who’s counting?) and set the stovetop for medium. This sauce recipe is designed to come together in the time it takes to heat water for, and cook pasta, so we won’t be letting it bubble away for an hour on the stove or anything like that.

While the oil heats, prep and mince the garlic. This video provides good, step-by-step instructions:

Add the garlic to the oil and give it a stir with a wooden spoon. Let it sit in there for about a minute, or until some of the garlic just begins to turn golden. This is caramelization and adds richness and depth by chemically altering sugars in ways scientists don’t yet understand(!) and adding a slight smoky flavor. Don’t let it burn! If it does, it’s not the end of the world, but burnt garlic can be pretty bitter.

Once the garlic has browned slightly, add the tomatoes and slowly stir everything together. When it warms a bit, give it a taste. It should taste very bight and very tomatoy. Now go ahead and add two large pinches of salt. Stir it in and give it another taste. Notice the difference? The salt should highlight some underlying flavors which will help equalize the bright, acidic flavor of the tomatoes (it’s from the skin, by the way).

So now what? First, spoon some of the sauce out into two bowls (just a little bit). This is for our experiment. Then shake some of the oregano into the pan (no harm in using dried herbs from the store, especially if you’re just starting out). Maybe a teaspoon’s worth. Mix it in and give the sauce another taste. If it still tastes really bright, shake in another teaspoon of oregano. You should notice something amazing begin to happen. The oregano will lend depth to the overall flavor of the sauce, cut the acidity and lend a certain sweetness and a certain smokiness to the whole affair. In essence, it’s balanced the flavors and made a more appetizing sauce. As a point of reference, go ahead and shake a few specks of nutmeg into one of the bowls you set aside and a few specks of nutmeg into the other. Give them a taste. Notice anything? Make note of how they changed they flavor. If they did it in a good way, then maybe add a bit of one of those spices to your sauce. If they made it taste terrible, then forget I ever mentioned it.

Working well with spices takes a long time. I’ve been cooking for a while, and I still use only five or six spices with any kind of regularity. However, if you think less about specific spices and more about what kind of flavors you want to work with, then you can really begin expanding your cooking repetoire to incorporate not just spices, but all manner of ingredients.

Heat
One thing I didn’t mention in our recipe for tomato sauce is heat. Heat is another flavor element that can add real complexity to a dish, especially when combined with sweet (think Thai dishes, which feature wonderful, complex chilis as well as sweet coconut flavors). Adding heat is usually accompanied by some acid, as many peppers and chilis tend to have fruity undertones. However, heat is one of those things that seems regionally distinct and, in my mind, works best with those dishes we traditionally think of when someone mentions a little fire: Schezwan, Thai, Indian, Mexican, and others, and seems deserving of its own post.

Extra credit
You know how lemon is often added to fish? The acid helps cut some of the fatty flavors that fish can harbor. Get what you made earlier that was pretty acidic? Tomato sauce without oregano. If you wanted to do a bang-up job cooking some flavor-neutral fish (orange roughy or grouper, let’s say), you could put some oil in a pan, get it really hot and sear the fish on each side for about 30 seconds. Transfer it to a non-reactive cooking vessel (a pyrex casserole dish, for example, spoon the tomato sauce over it, and bake it in the oven for about 10 or 15 minutes. Pull it from the sauce, garnish with some sliced black olives and finely chopped chives and you’d have a great and easy fish dish.

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sauteed kale salad with whole wheat penne pasta and great northern beans

Just before January 1, I resolved to eat better. A glimpse of myself in the JC Penney dressing room mirror convinced me that I had to do something. Not something drastic, not something quick, just something in general. Taking a prompt from Mark Bittman, I resolved to become vegetarian before 6pm (I don’t think I have the energy to go vegan).

This resolution brings up a couple problems. First, I don’t really know how to cook vegetarian. It takes a slightly different mindset than what I’m used to. There’s no central protein around which to build a meal. In fact, vegetarian eating tends to encourage grazing. A snack here and there, and at dinner time, several dishes from which to pick and choose. The second problem is much more practical. I can’t take leftovers for lunch. Garlic chicken thighs don’t become vegetables just because I take them out of the fridge and they’re fully cooked. I find myself having to come up with recipes and dishes that are easy to make, that keep well, and that I can transform across a couple days into delicious, reasonably healthy lunches. I’m hoping the reasonably can be dropped as I become more comfortable with the new menu.

For my first go, I thought I’d try to create a bean salad that I could use in a number of dishes. it worked, and I’m happy to report that great northern beans in what amounts to a heated balsamic vinaigrette are utterly fantastic and extremely versatile.

Great northern bean salad

Beans:

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic (3 for extra flavor)
• 1 medium shallot
• 16 oz. cooked great northern beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt,
• 1/8 teaspoon ground white pepper
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup pasta water

Pasta:

• 1 package spinach rotini
• 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt

Cook the pasta as per the directions on the package, just make sure you salt your water (1 1/2 tablespoons for the recommended water amount on the package). While the pasta cooks, heat good quality extra virgin olive oil over medium heat in a large skillet. As it heats, mince the garlic and shallot. Toss them into the pan and let them saute for a couple minutes, until the garlic just begins to brown. Watch carefully, though. If the garlic begins to burn, it’s too late.

Add the beans (yes, canned is okay), the salt and the oregano, stir until the beans are heated through, add the vinegar, let it sizzle a couple seconds, then add the pasta water and the pepper.

Toss with the pasta and you’ve made meal one. (When I made this dish, I used the whole wheat penne we had in the pantry. If I did it again, I probably would use a spinach pasta since the birch colored beans would offset nicely against the dark green pasta.)

For lunch the second day, I sauteed kale, tossed the cooked kale with the bean and pasta mixture and had an amazing lunch. And sauteed greens are about as easy a thing as you can make:

Again, heat a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil over medium high. When the oil begins to shimmer, but before it begins to smoke, add about three good-sized portions of kale (or other green). Add two healthy pinches of kosher salt, and use a wooden spoon to shove the kale around the pan to ensure even cooking (for those writing down measurements, figure four packed cups of kale, a teaspoon of kosher salt). When the kale has cooked down some–probably about half its original volume, add some lemon juice, and toss with a cup of your pasta salad. Seriously awesome.

Fresh citrus fennel salad

Ingredients (serves 4)
2 medium fennel bulbs, greens attached
4 teaspoons lemon juice
8 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 + 1 teaspoons orange zest

Technique
shave
mix